Boundless by Jillian Tamaki

The cartoonist of This One Summer and SuperMutant Magic Academy explores the virtual and IRL world of contemporary women via a lens both surreal and wry

Jenny becomes obsessed with a strange "mirror Facebook," which presents an alternate, possibly better, version of herself. Helen finds her clothes growing baggy, her shoes looser, and as she shrinks away to nothingness, the world around her recedes as well. The animals of the city briefly open their minds to us, and we see the world as they do. A mysterious music file surfaces on the internet and forms the basis of a utopian society–or is it a cult?

Boundless is at once fantastical and realist, playfully hinting at possible transcendence: from one’s culture, one’s relationship, oneself. This collection of short stories is a showcase for the masterful blend of emotion and humour of award-winning cartoonist Jillian Tamaki.

Praise for Boundless

Jillian Tamaki boldly emerges as a new titan of the comics medium... The whole endeavor feels like Adrian Tomine meets Jorge Luis Borges, while also feeling like nothing we’ve seen before.

Tamaki's voice shines throughout this masterpiece... as she effortlessly blends love and pain, fantasy and reality.

Nylon Magazine

Jillian Tamaki's short comics are propelled by contemporary phenomena... but such elements never seem to shackle Boundless to the present. Tamaki's existential wistfulness lifts text messages and memes into the realm of archetype [with] inventive, versatile art.

Unsettling yet oddly exhilarating... What’s truly arresting about the book is how its strange episodes float in the half-visible, shimmery cusp between deeper meaning and banality. It’s this delicate liminality that allows Tamaki’s odder scenarios, which in hammier hands might seem too self-consciously trippy, to communicate a subtle, intimate sense of the dangers of everyday personhood... Tamaki’s inextricable tones of dark humor and oddly bright sadness linger with the reader, uncontained by the arbitrary limits of the book’s covers. Both, it seems, are infinite.

In addition to serving as a showcase for her lush, expressive art, this collection highlights Tamaki’s.... incisive examinations of nostalgia, consumption, process, notions of self and, of course, the internet.

Jillian Tamaki's finely hewn tales read like transmissions from a parallel universe just as lonely as our own, but in a more beautifully felt, hilariously ephemeral way. These are precious stories, stories to fall into like an odd dream you left too soon.

Alexandra Kleeman

Boundless feels at one time wholly of this moment and otherworldly, presenting a reality that’s tilted slightly off its axis. Her evocative drawings are intimate, energetic, in moments loose and casual, in others tight and finely rendered.

Oblique yet memorable...This is spooky stuff; like the best visual storytellers, Tamaki has the knack of giving us just enough visual and narrative information to hint at much larger mysteries while leaving them mostly unsolved.

A profoundly honest, bittersweet picture of human nature, made all the more haunting by her enchanting artwork.

Booklist, Starred Review

Jillian Tamaki seems capable of drawing anything, in any style, and making it appear effortless. Her writing could be described in the same way, and it's thrilling to see those twin skills of hers united in service of these daring, unpredictable, and quietly strange stories.